Teach english new edition r

Planning questions
Unless teachers walk towards a class with absolutely no idea about (or interest in) what is 
going to happen when they get there, they will have thought about what they are going to 
do. These thoughts may be extremely detailed and formalised, or they may be vaguer and 
m ore informal. W hen we discuss plan formats on page 160, we will see differences between 
more and less formal thinking of this kind, but in every case teachers will be answering 
seven fundam ental questions when they decide what activities to take to a lesson.
Who exactly are the students for this activity?
The make-up of the class will influence the way we plan. The students’ age, level, cultural 
background and individual characteristics have to be taken into account when deciding what 
activities, texts or methodologies to use in the classroom. This includes an understanding 
of the kinds of individual differences in learning style, for example, that we discussed in 
Chapter 1.
What do we want to do and why?
We have to decide what we want to do in the lesson in terms of both activities, skills and 
language. We also need to know why we want to do it. It m ight be because we ourselves like 
the activity, or because we think it will be appropriate for a particular day or a particular 
group. There is nothing wrong with deciding to do an activity simply because we think it 
will make students feel good.
However, before deciding to use an activity just because we or the students m ight like 
it, we need to try to predict what it will achieve. W hat will students know, be able to do, 
understand or feel after the activity that they did not know, were not able to do, did not 
understand or feel before? W hat, in other words, is the learning outcome of the activity?
Examples of what an activity m ight achieve include giving students a greater 
understanding of an area of vocabulary, providing them with better listening strategies, 
teaching them how to construct conditional sentences, improving their oral fluency or 
raising the morale of the group through appropriate cooperative interaction.